Realtor site with external links in navigation

[lcallander]

I have a client with a realtor site that uses IDX for the listings feed.  We have several external links going over to the IDX site for various live custom searches (ie: luxury listings, waterfront listings, etc...).  We are getting a Moz spam ranking of 2/7 for both "Large Number of External Links" and "External Links in Navigation".  Chances are, these are related.

My question is this:

(1) Being the score is only 2/7, should I bother with fixing this?

(2) If I add a rel="nofollow" to all the site-wide links (in header, footer & menu) will this help?  I couldn't find anything definitive in the Q&A search.

Looking forward to any insights!!!

[CraigBradford]

Hi Laurean, are you able to share the site that you're looking at? It would be much easier to give you an answer if I could take a look. Alternatively, if you know any similar sites that have the same issue, I can look at that example to begin with.

Craig

[lcallander]

I think you have misunderstood what I meant about the site.  The realtor site uses an IDX providor to manage their listings and custom searches.  HOWEVER, all the blogging, neighborhood info, and SEO relevant items remain on the main website.  But to look at a listing, or open a search, you have to LINK OUT to a customized page on the IDX server.  Most realtors in our area, who are ranking well, are utilizing a similar format.

[Mobilio]

This was explained https://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk and https://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday

Isn't 2/7 but it's 2/17.

1. According Moz pages with "external link in navigation" percent of sites penalized with this flag - without that flag are penalized = 19% vs. 7%. Hmm... with 19% i will be hesitated about this flag! Same numbers are for "large number of external links".
2. Nofollow wont help too much because links are internal and external. And giving external link nofollow in navigation isn't helping. Should you ever have external link in this navigation? What is purpose of this site - low quality site with landing pages full with keywords and EMD? Should this site exist in SERP? Please note - it's end of 2015 and there are new rules for SEO shared in Rand Fishkin presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/onsite-seo-in-2015-an-elegant-weapon-for-a-more-civilized-marketer So today people are worked for getting higher CTR, avg. visit duration, pages/session even bounce rate. And single external link in navigation can broke statistics/analytics.

If everything is OK on your both sites or network of sites. But that 19% wont give me a good and quality sleep. Who's know how tomorrow algorithms will evaluate sites?